5 Ways You Are Killing User Engagement

It is important to have an impressive online presence, no matter what industry you’re in. First impressions are all-important, and the first exposure someone has of your business could be your website. While you may be selling a superior product or offering a very attractive service, certain mistakes can ensure you’ll struggle to get great results and inhibit conversions on your website. Here are a few common mistakes that can negatively impact the success of your business, and how to effectively remedy them.

Your Site Is Slow

There’s nothing that deters potential buyers like a slow or confusing website. If a potential buy has to wait several seconds for a page to load, chances are they’ll give up, go elsewhere, and never come back. Making sure your website and web hosting are optimized for performance is crucial if you want visitors to stay on your site longer, and do what you want them to do once there. You’ve also got to ensure that your site is optimized for various different devices such as laptops, tablets and phones. If it’s hard to read your content, or videos aren’t loading, then your website engagement will be predictably low.

Lackluster Content

Some companies might be reluctant to spend money on a specialist writer to provide website content. While you may think you’re being smart and saving money by writing content yourself or getting an employee to do it, this is one of the occasions where a little more initial spending will pay huge dividends in the long run. First, quality content gives you an air of legitimacy and professionalism. No one wants to buy from a company who makes spelling or grammatical errors on their website – if you don’t have the attention to detail in this respect, it could chip away at your credibility.

Second, well-written copy can be persuasive and sales-focused without being too pushy. When done correctly, you’ll nudge the reader toward conversion in an organic way. Finally, informative and engaging content will also likely help from an SEO perspective. Simply stuffing every paragraph full of keywords can backfire and lead to a low ranking, so make sure your writers can seamlessly and sensibly insert these words and phrases.

Ambiguous CTA’s

If you’re not clear enough with your objectives, your prospective customers or clients won’t know what to do and won’t convert? A call to action is an instruction to your audience, encouraging them to engage in a specific way, whether that’s buying a product, requesting a quote or giving you a call. This links to the prior point – good content will funnel the reader toward the outcome you’re wanting and get them to convert. Your entire website should be optimized for conversions, not just the copy – make sure you’ve got large, visible buttons with clear directives for visitors to click, or prominently displayed contact details to make things as simple as possible.

Bad Design Friction

There’s nothing that deters potential buyers like a confusing website that requires jump through hoops to make a simple purchase. This is bad design friction. There are examples of good design friction – a pause in the user’s journey where the confirm their data, for example – and that most definitely has its place. Be cognizant of the amount of design friction in your website experience – how many clicks, disclaimers, and obstacles does your user face in they path to conversion – and reduce where possible.

Ignoring SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, should be a huge part of any marketing strategy. And while you’ve got to ensure your site looks great and performs well, you’ve also got to ensure that people can actually find it. SEO is still something of a guessing game, but there’s way more science in it now and it’s not near the dark magic it used to be. There are several things that can help give your website better visibility in search results. From inserting relevant keywords into your copy to getting backlinks to your site, there are a few proven methods of increasing traffic. Some of these will give quick results, and others will take time to pay off. Ultimately, though, quality SEO methods eventually always pay off. There’s plenty of information out there online, so read up on a few pointers, or give us a shout if you don’t have the time or the resources to do so yourself.

Conclusion

If you put some of these ideas into practice, the outcome will be measurable. You might balk at increased initial cost but your reward will be the results you’ll see over time.